August, 2012

My name is Maddie and am currently a rising sophomore at NYU majoring in Media, Culture, and Communication and minoring in Gender & Sexuality studies. I originally applied for my major with the intent to work in the fashion industry post-college but after becoming fascinated by how the media affects people, more specifically women, I decided to take a different path. Picking up my minor at the end of my freshman year I am hoping to graduate and go onto grad school with a focus on the ways in which women are portrayed in the media and why this portrayal is often detrimental.

Before college I considered myself a liberal but didn’t understand what a feminist was and didn’t even give thought to self-identifying with the term. It wasn’t until we touched upon gender in my introductory media classes that I began to understand that the messages sent to women through media, specifically through imaging, are harmful and are often used to control women’s thoughts and actions (more specifically, what women spend their money on). I also realized that the way I view myself as a female is greatly affected by patriarchal media and that this type of media is responsible for why I did and still do struggle with my appearance and sexuality. Feminist thinking gave me a freedom that I did not have previously and as a feminist (even though I may be a novice) I feel that’s it’s essential that I spread feminist thought to others through writing and activism. I hope that by writing for The Line I can generate feminist thought in myself and others!

In my spare time I like to read, write, watch entire television seasons on Netflix in one sitting, slowly kill my soul working in retail, and sometimes be productive. You can read my rude grrrl rants on my new blog hexgrrrlfriend or find my highly inappropriate tweets on my Twitter.

I think about being a woman all the time. I think about it when I interview for a job or open a bank account, during sex, in the shower, in my relationship with a man, and in a non-gender-fixed way. As part of the “invisible knapsack of male privilege,” it seems that most (underline most, not all) men do not think about their sex in these situations.

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

Today’s Badass is Diana Adams. Diana is a lawyer who specializes in working with members of non-traditional families, such as members of the LGBT and poly communities, sincle parent families or grandparent child guardians. She herself openly identifies as a queer poly woman and has also been engaging in activism to foster acceptance polyamory and non-traditional relationships. You can read more about her here and here.

This Monday I was flipping through channels on my flight to California and I landed on Comedy Central. It’s been three hours, I have two or three more to go, so I figure, why not. My uncle loves this channel and I’ve never really seen it myself, so I’ll try it out. And of course, the first thing they start talking about is Daniel Tosh. If you haven’t heard anything about the controversy from a couple of weeks ago with Daniel Tosh and rape jokes, I’ll sum it up for you. Two women went into a comedy club to see a line up of comedians, not knowing who a handful of them were. Daniel Tosh, one of these comedians, started to talk about rape, to which one woman stood up in the crowd and said, “rape jokes aren’t funny.”

Now let’s be honest here. Is standing up in the middle of a comedy club and talking back to a comedian the best idea in the world? No. Will you get hit back, hard? Absolutely. Would she have been better off going to him after the show and confronting him? Sure, if she wanted to be brushed off and have her comment not make any sort of impact. But she did say something, out loud too. And she made one hell of an impact.

Firstly, this started another round of the conflict raging between “stereotypical feminists [who] can’t take a joke,” and a group made of mostly men and other comedians about whether rape jokes are funny.

Now I need to say very clearly: rape jokes are not funny. Trivializing the trauma of something so intimately violating and psychologically damaging is not funny. I’m a college student, and I live 8 months a year with a population that’s fifty percent males ages 18-21. And I’ve talked with a fair share of my guy friends who find crude humor funny. So I get it, and I can keep a relatively open mind about jokes about sex and politics and things that are beyond inappropriate. I’m nineteen and in my third year of college, so I’m not that far off in finding juvenile things hilarious. But rape? That’s a different story. Rape, is not a joke. And never should be.

The second thing people argued about, and what started this whole whirlwind, was Daniel Tosh’s response. Now as a popular comedian I think he could have come up with a million and one different things to “put an audience member back in her place”. But of all the things in the world, he chose instead to say, “you know what would be really funny? If she got raped, by like, five guys right now”. Different sources say different things, but that’s the general gist of it.

Now I get it. Daniel Tosh is an edgy comedian. There’s a lot of people who say that she should have just left, that she shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and that, above all, she shouldn’t have heckled him. Fine. But she said it, and I hardly think that any amount of heckling warranted what Tosh said.

It’s not a point of contention that her comment made an impact, Tosh’s joke was all I heard about those few days after the incident. But this morning? I turn on the news and hear about protestors in Anaheim, drama within the Jackson family, with Tosh long forgotten. And I get it. The world we live in is unbelievably fast paced, so many things happen that make incidents like the one with Tosh just a small blip on the media radar. But as the world continues to turn, comments like Tosh’s continue to be made. And empowering rape in that way, regardless of the fact that it’s intended to be comedic? Should not happen. But it still does. And unless someone finally decides to act on it, things like this will continue to happen.